Capital: A Novel Read online

  The van noise came again, an even louder rumbling this time, and then the van moved off, but not far: she heard it park just down the road. Through the window she saw the logo: Tesco! A man came up to her front garden carrying a pallet, and cleverly managed to unlatch the gate with his hip. Petunia got up carefully, using both arms and taking a moment to steady herself. She opened the door.

  ‘Morning, love. You all right? No substitutions. Shall I take it through? There’s a warden but I told him don’t even think about it.’

  The nice Tesco man took her shopping through to the kitchen and put her bags on the table. As she had got older Petunia more and more often noticed when people made displays of unthinking health and strength. An example was here in the ease with which this young man lifted the heavy pallet to dump it on the table, before taking the bags out of it four at a time. His shoulders and arms stretched out sideways as he lifted the bags: it made him look enormous, like a body-building polar bear.

  Petunia did not go in much for being embarrassed about things being out of date, but even she was a little self-conscious about her kitchen. Linoleum, once it started to look tatty, somehow looked extra-tatty, even when it was clean. But the man didn’t seem to notice. He was very polite. If he had been the kind of workman you tipped, Petunia would have given him a nice tip, but Mary, when she set up the delivery, had told her – irritatedly, as if knowing her mother well enough to be annoyed at what she was thinking – that you didn’t tip supermarket delivery men.

  ‘Thank you,’ Petunia said. As she closed the door behind the man she saw there was a postcard on the doormat. She bent over, again carefully, and picked it up. The card was a photograph of 42 Pepys Road, her own house. She turned it over. There was no signature on the card, only a typed message. It said, ‘We Want What You Have’. That made Petunia smile. Why on earth would anybody want what she had?

  2

  The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe’s, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums. He was trying to work out if his bonus that year would come to a million pounds.

  At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six foot three, just short enough to feel no need to conceal his height by stooping – so that even his tallness appeared a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than on more ordinary people. The resulting complacency seemed so well-deserved, and came with so little need to emphasise his own good fortune relative to anyone else, that it appeared like a form of charm. It helped that Roger was good-looking, in an anonymous way, and had such good manners. He had been to a good school (Harrow) and a good university (Durham) and got a good job (in the City of London) and been perfect in his timing (just after the Big Bang, just before the City became infatuated by the mathematically gifted and/or barrow boys). He would have fitted seamlessly in the old City of London, where people came in late and left early and had a good lunch in between, and where everything depended on who you were and whom you knew and how well you blended in, and the greatest honour was to be one of us and to ‘play well with others’; but he fit in very well in the new City too, where everything was supposedly meritocratic, where the ideology was to work hard, play hard, and take no prisoners; to be in the office from seven to seven, minimum, and where nobody cared what your accent was or where you came from as long as you showed you were up for it and made money for your employer. Roger had a deep, instinctive understanding of the way in which people in the new City liked reminders of the old City as long as they showed that they also accepted the new City’s way of doing things, and he was very adroit at signalling his status as someone who would have been at home in the old world but who loved the modern one – even his clothes, beautifully made suits from a wide-boy, Flash Harry tailor just off Savile Row, showed that he understood. (His wife Arabella helped him with that.) He was a popular boss, who never lost his temper and was good at letting people get on with things.

  That was an important skill. A skill worth a million quid in a good year, you would have thought . . . But it was not straightforward for Roger to calculate the size of his bonus. His employer, a smallish investment bank, did not make it straightforward, and there were many considerations at work to do with the size of the company’s profits overall, the portion of those profits made by his department, which traded in foreign currency markets, the relative performance of his department when compared with its competitors, and a number of other factors, many of them not at all transparent, and some of them based on subjective judgements of how well he had performed as a manager. There was an element of deliberate mystification about the process, which was in the hands of the compensation committee, sometimes known as the Politburo. What it boiled down to was, there was no way of being confident about what the size of your bonus was going to be.

  Sitting on Roger’s desk were three computer screens, one of them tracking departmental activity in real time, another being Roger’s own PC, given over to email and IM and video-conferencing and his diary, another tracking trades in the foreign exchange department over the year. According to that they were showing a profit of about £75,000,000 on a turnover of £625,000,000 so far, which, although he said it himself, wasn’t bad. Simple justice, looking at those numbers, would surely see him awarded a bonus of £1,000,000. But it had been a strange year in the markets ever since the collapse of Northern Rock a few months before. Basically, the Rock had destroyed itself with its own business model. Their credit had dried up, the Bank of England had been asleep, and the punters had panicked. Since then, credit had been more expensive, and people were twitchy. That was OK as far as Roger was concerned, because in the foreign exchange business, twitchy meant volatile, and volatile meant profitable. The FX world had seen a number of fairly self-evident one-way bets against high-interest currencies, the Argentinian peso for instance; some rival firms’ FX departments had, he knew, made out like bandits. This was where the lack of transparency became a problem. The Politburo might be benchmarking him against some impossible standard of profitability based on some whizz-kid idiot, some boy racer who had pulled off a few crazy unhedged bets. There were certain numbers which couldn’t be beaten without taking what the bank told him to think of as unacceptable risks. The way it worked, however, was that the risks tended to seem less unacceptable when they were making you spectacular amounts of money.

  The other potential problem was that the bank might claim to be making less money overall this year, so that bonuses in general would be down on expectations – and indeed there were rumours that Pinker Lloyd was sitting on some big losses in its mortgage loan department. There had also been a well-publicised disappointment over their Swiss subsidiary, which had been outcompeted in a takeover fight and seen its stock price drop 30 per cent as a result. The Politburo might claim that ‘times are hard’ and ‘the pain must be shared equally’ and ‘we’re all giving a little blood this time’ and (with a wink) ‘next year in Jerusalem’. What a gigantic pain in the arse that would be.

  Roger moved around in his swivel chair so that he was looking out the window towards Canary Wharf. The rain had cleared and the early-setting December sun was making the towers, normally so solid-looking and unethereal, seem momentarily aflame with clean gold light. It was half past three and he would be at work for another four hours minimum; these were the months during which he would both leave the house before the sun had risen and get home long after it had set. That was something Roger had long since stopped noticing or thinking about. In his experience, people who complained about City hours were either about to quit, or about to be sacked. He swivelled back the other way. He preferred to face inwards, towards ‘the pit’ as everyone called it, in honour of the trading floors where people yelled and fought and waved papers – though the foreign exchange trading department couldn’t be less like that, as forty people sat at screens, murmuring into headsets or at
each other but in general hardly looking up from the flow of data. His office had glass walls, but there were blinds which could be lowered when he wanted privacy, and he had a new toy too, a machine generating white noise, which could be turned on to prevent conversation being overheard outside the room. All department heads had one. It was genuinely cool. Most of the time, though, he liked having the door of his office open so he could feel the activity in the room outside. Roger knew from experience that being cut off from your department was a risk, and that the more you knew about what was going on among your underlings the less chance you had of unpleasant surprises.

  He knew this partly because of the way he had got his job. He had been deputy in the very same department when the bank suddenly brought in random drugs tests. Four of his colleagues were tested and all four failed, which was no surprise to Roger, since the tests were on a Monday and he knew perfectly well that all the younger traders spent the whole weekend completely off their faces. (Two of them had been taking coke, one ecstasy, and one had been smoking dope – and it was the last guy who worried Roger, since in his opinion marijuana was a loser’s drug.) The four had been given final warnings and their boss had been fired. Roger could have told him what was going on if he had asked, but he hadn’t, and his way of letting Roger do all the work for him had been so arrogant, so old-school, that Roger, who was too lazy in interpersonal relations to be a nasty or scheming man, was not sorry to see him go.

  Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him. One of the reasons he had fallen for and married Arabella was that she had a gift for making life seem easy. That, to Roger, was an important talent.

  He wanted to do well and to be seen as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it because he needed the money. The figure of £1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of £150,000 was nice as what Arabella called ‘frock money’, but it did not pay even for his two mortgages. The house in Pepys Road was double-fronted and had cost £2,500,000, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then. They had converted the loft, dug out the basement, redone all the wiring and plumbing because there was no point in not doing it, knocked through the downstairs, added a conservatory, built out the side extension, redecorated from top to bottom (Joshua’s room had a cowboy theme, Conrad’s a spaceman motif, though he had started to express a preference for all things Viking, and Arabella was thinking about a redesign). They had added two bathrooms and changed the main bathroom into an en suite, then changed it into a wet room because they were all the rage, then changed it back into a normal (though very de luxe) bathroom because there was something vulgar about the wet room and also the humidity seeped into the bedroom and made Arabella feel chesty. Arabella had a dressing room and Roger had a study. The kitchen had been initially from Smallbone of Devizes but Arabella had gone off that and got a new German one with an amazing smoke extractor and a colossal American fridge. The nanny flat had been done up with a separate pair of rooms and kitchen, because in Arabella’s view it was important to have that feeling of cut-offness when she, whoever she was, had boyfriends over to stay; the nanny’s quarters had a smoke alarm so sensitive that it would go off in response to someone lighting a cigarette. But in the event they didn’t like having a live-in nanny, that sense of someone under their feet, and there was something naff and seventies about the idea of having a lodger, so the flat was empty. The sitting room was underwired (Cat 5 cabling, obviously, as all through the house) and the Bang & Olufsen system could stream music all through the adult rooms of the house. The television was a sixty-inch plasma. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Considering the Hirst from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, Roger’s considered judgement about the painting was that it had cost £47,000, plus VAT. Leaving out the furnishings but including architects’, surveyors’ and builders’ fees, the Younts’ work on their house had cost about £650,000.

  The Old Parsonage in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, had also not been cheap. It was a lovely building from 1780, though the outside impression of Georgian airiness and proportion was undermined by the fact that the rooms were smallish and the windows admitted less light than one might expect. Still. Their offer of £900,000 had been accepted and then gazumped for £975,000 so they had had to regazump and it had become theirs for a cool £1,000,000. Renovation and general tarting up had cost £250,000, some of it in lawyers’ fees fighting the utterly pointless minutiae of the listing restrictions (it was Grade Two). The tiny subsidiary cottage at the end of the garden had come up for sale and they felt it was essential to buy that, given that as things stood it was a little too cosy when friends came to stay. The vendors, a surveyor and his boyfriend who were second-homers themselves, knew they had the Younts over a barrel, and with prices surging everywhere had gouged £400,000 for the tiny cottage, which turned out to need another £100,000 of work for structural issues.

  Minchinhampton was lovely – you can’t beat the English countryside. Everyone agreed. But going there for your year’s major summer holiday was a little bit dowdy, Arabella felt. It was more of a weekend place. So they also went away for two weeks in the summer, taking a few friends and, on alternate years, inviting either Roger’s or Arabella’s parents for one week out of the two. The going rate for the sort of villa they had in mind seemed to be £10,000 a week. Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn’t, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class. They had on two separate occasions, on good bonus years, hired a private jet, which was an experience from which it was hard to go back to queuing for your luggage . . . Then they would go away again, sometimes at Christmas – though not this year, mercifully, Roger felt – but more often either in the middle of February or for the Easter holidays. The exact dates depended on the timing of Conrad’s break at Westminster Under School, who were ferocious about only taking breaks during approved times – a little too ferocious, Roger thought, about a five-year-old boy, but that was what you paid your £20,000 a year for.

  The other costs, when you began to think about them, added up too. Pilar the nanny was £20,000 a year out of net income – more like £35,000 gross once all the pissy employment taxes were allowed for. Sheila the weekend nanny was another £200 a time, adding up to about £9,000 (though they paid her in cash and they didn’t pay her for holidays, unless she came with them, which she often did; or they would get another nanny from an agency). Arabella’s BMW M3 ‘for the shops’ had been £55,000 and the Lexus S400, the principal family car, which was used in practice by the nanny on the school run and play dates, was £75,000. Roger also had a Mercedes E500 given him by the office, and on which he paid only the tax of about ten grand per annum; though he hardly ever used it and made a point of preferring the Tube, which, leaving the house at 6.45 a.m. and returning at about 8 p.m., was bearable. Other things: £2,000 a month on clothes, about the same on house stuff (shared between the two homes, obviously), tax bill of about £250,000 from last year, a need to make a pension contribution ‘well into six figures’, as his accountant put it, £10,000 for their annual summer party, and then the general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London, restaurants and shoes and parking fines and cinema tickets and gardeners and the feeling that every time you went anywhere or did anything money just started melting off you. Roger didn’t mind that, he was completely up for it, but it did mean that if he didn’t get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk
of going broke.

  3

  It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office, opposite the man who more than any other was going to help him earn his million-quid bonus, and the man who was going to play the single biggest role in deciding whether or not he was paid it.

  The first man was his deputy, Mark. He was not quite thirty, a full ten years younger than Roger and pale from all his time indoors sitting in front of a screen. Mark had the habit of constantly, and almost invisibly, shifting: he moved his weight from foot to foot, touched his watch, checked that something was in his pocket, or made small twitching facial movements, as if to adjust the way that his glasses were sitting on his nose. The effect was a little like that produced by people who in conversation constantly use the first name of the person they are speaking to: you can go years without noticing this but once you do it is hard not to become distracted by it – hard, in fact, not to feel that it is specifically intended to drive you mad. That was how Roger felt about Mark’s fidgeting. At that very moment he was fiddling with a Montblanc ballpoint pen.

  In many respects Mark was a perfect deputy. He worked hard, never made a mistake, was not too obvious about wanting Roger’s job, and if you left aside the question of his non-stop fidgeting, never seemed flustered. There was a slight sense that he kept things too tightly under control, and he was the kind of person who might turn out to have a secret vice: if he turned out to be a paedo or bondage freak or to have a chopped-up body under his floorboards or something, Roger would be surprised, but he wouldn’t be all that surprised. He would have been very surprised indeed if he had known what Mark really thought of him, and also what a close and personal interest his deputy took in his boss’s life – in where Roger lived and where he’d gone to school, in his children’s names and birthdays, in his wife’s spending habits and in the way he spent his free time. Roger would have been completely freaked out by that, but he didn’t know anything about it, so that wasn’t why Mark made Roger uneasy.